He was small for his age — still a boy, really, with spiked hair and pimples speckled across his cheeks. He looked even smaller in a pair of oversize flip-flops, curling his toes so they didn't slip off.
School was never his thing. Back before his home was bulldozed and he was displaced in his own country, Mohammed Ayuf spent most of his time in the market where his family owned a grocery, frying up samosas to sell for pennies apiece.
At this camp, his days assumed a routine: wake up, pray at the mosque, return to his family's hut. Most nights he slept outdoors on the hard earth, swatting hopelessly at flies.
The 16-year-old began talking about leaving, like his older brother two years before and tens of thousands of other ethnic Rohingya Muslims who have braved a perilous sea crossing to escape crushing oppression in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar.
In phone conversations from Malaysia, his brother admonished Ayuf not to try to join him.
"The journey is dangerous," he told him, "and if you survive, it doesn't get easier."
One night this spring, Ayuf announced that he was going to visit his mother, who had fallen sick and was staying with relatives in a nearby village. Instead, he set off in the opposite direction, toward the place the smugglers had described.
Before leaving he picked up three packets of samosas, promising the shopkeeper he would pay later. He walked north along the Bay of Bengal, across paddy fields bathed in ghostly gray moonlight, until he reached a desolate beach where a boat was waiting for him
The exodus of Rohingya from Myanmar this year has produced a catalog of horrors: abuse and exploitation by traffickers, grim working conditions in hostile foreign lands and the deaths and disappearances of untold numbers at sea. United Nations refugee officials estimate that more than 1,100 people have died in illicit boat journeys in Southeast Asia since 2014. Hundreds more remain unaccounted for.
Yet for many Rohingya — often described as the world's most persecuted minority group — the lives they leave behind are worse.
On a low, sweltering peninsula along Myanmar's western coast, rows of bamboo huts, small and cube-shaped, unfold toward a forbidding sea. More than 100,000 Rohingya live here in temporary camps such as Thet Kae Pyin, where they in effect have been imprisoned since the eruption of anti-Muslim violence in 2012.
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